Early Thoughts on The Supreme Court and the Midterms

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel argues, as he has been doing a lot lately, the case for optimism for Democrats and pessimism for Republicans about the 2018 midterm elections –

this time, specifically in the context of the effect of a Supreme Court vacancy on the midterms.

There’s nothing wrong with arguing these things from a point of view; I’ve long argued that readers are better suited to arrive at the truth in a lot of areas by an adversarial process of reading and weighing opposing arguments than by searching for the elusive totally objective observer.

Election forecasting, especially this early in the cycle, involves a healthy dose of judgment and historical perspective to go with the hard data and shoe-leather reporting, so it can’t be done solely by white-coated laboratory experiments.